what's up with square files?

This is a discussion on what's up with square files? within the A Brief History of Cprogramming.com forums, part of the Community Boards category; I was just thinking, I was looking at someone's pic thing that we all get, the avatar, and i noticed ...

and you see all that extra space there? imagine the picture was blown up a couple 1000 times, and those white spaces would then take up a LOT of space.

Well, just a thought, I wonder if in the future if we will ever have "amorpheus" files. For instance, the file above wouldn't be a block, it would actually be molded around the data, and the blank space wouldn't be anything.......

say you had a picture of a diamond with a corner in the middle of each side, with the normal file system, you'd have to waste ALL that space in the corners for nothing, whereas in the amorpheus system, it would just mold itself around the file's data, saving twice as much space almost!

I believe his point was, if you have a picture of a triangle, half of the picture contains the graphics and the other half is transparent, but still uses space in the bitmap. If a new filesystem was invented that, somehow, only stores the graphics data and not the transparent parts, you could save some filesize.

Naturally I didn't feel inspired enough to read all the links for you, since I already slaved away for long hours under a blistering sun pressing the search button after typing four whole words! - Quzah

You. Fetch me my copy of the Wall Street Journal. You two, fight to the death - Stewie

>>> with memory/storage so plentiful, we don't need to worry too much about wasted data.

I think the important point is not local storage, but bandwidth during transmission. Poor example I agree, (I wouldn't send such a thing as a bitmap), but assume I want to send you a bitmap which is 100x100 and contains one blue pixel, and the rest are transparent.

Naturally I didn't feel inspired enough to read all the links for you, since I already slaved away for long hours under a blistering sun pressing the search button after typing four whole words! - Quzah

You. Fetch me my copy of the Wall Street Journal. You two, fight to the death - Stewie